Blackberry Playbook hacked to run iOS apps

You know what would make the Blackberry Playbook be, well, not so terrible?

If it were more like an iPad. If there’s one thing we’re learning about the tablet market, much more so than the smartphone environment, it’s that the only thing that really matters is the availability of apps.

That’s why the Playbook is so darn irrelevant, but one developer has changed that.

A man going by the username businesscat2000 posted a bunch of videos on the forums at Crackberry.com, showing what appears to be a Playbook running apps that you’re only supposed to be able to find on the Apple App Store, like Super Monkey Ball and Tom Tom.

The proof of concept was validated by Crackberry’s Kevin Michaluk, who asked businesscat2000 to run a couple tests with his hacked Playbook as proof. He completed those tests.

Here’s what the developer said about his work: “The CPU isn’t emulated on Playbook (though it is on Windows). It works very similarly to how WINE works to run Windows applications on Linux.

The app binary is mapped into memory and imports are resolved to point to my own implementation of the various APIs needed. iOS actually uses a few open APIs already, which Playbook supports just as well (GL ES, and OpenAL).”